I hosted a dance party for a few middle schoolers from church last night. Besides providing the wood floors to dance crazily on, my task was to select appropriate, upbeat songs for them to dance to. This is the result: A YouTube playlist. I'd embed it, but apparently Blogger isn't enabled to do so. I definitely threw a few throwback songs in there for good measure. The W's "The Devil is Bad," N*Sync's "Bye Bye Bye," and the Numa Numa song (properly named "Dragostea Din Tei")... The girls got a kick out of watching me and the other chaperone dancing and singing to these '90s and '00s songs they'd never heard of. (They also squealed with delight for many of the other songs. I felt rather accomplished and in touch with middle school culture, oddly enough.)

I’m doing a presentation on music from the Río de la Plata area on Monday. In preparation, I was looking for some good videos to illustrate the kinds of music I’ll be talking about. And I ran across this:

What a day. Exhausting, and I haven't even been to work yet! I found out yesterday that one of my apartmentmates was going to a contra dancing thing this afternoon, and wanted people to go with her. She's said that it is really fun. From what I understood, it was like the dancing from the five-hour version of the movie "Pride & Prejudice" (which is of course based upon my favorite book!) and resembled square dancing just a little... so I figured I may as well. It sounded fun enough. So, clad in our fun, twirly skirts, we arrived a little before two o'clock this afternoon, and danced... for three straight hours !! Some of contra dancing was completely new to me... I've never done long line dance things before, besides the Virginia Reel; but that was half to two-thirds of the dancing there. I was also new to certain of the moves (I had to learn a different swing from what I knew in square dancing), and quite unused to all the twirling that happens in co...

I've been in class or working practically all day, and wouldn't you know it--it's been marvelous outside, with the sun shining bright and the wind blowing gently! So I've become stir-crazy... and I've decided to go on a bike ride! I'm going to take a new route today, and I'm dragging a friend along with me. Last night at ballroom dancing, a few friends and I worked on making a group dance out of the Hustle... and really did make good headway on it! We've managed to work four moves in, besides the basic. You can't imagine how odd we look, though--for one thing, we all move closer into the circle at one point, so we look like an expanding and collapsing starburst the whole time.

...was hilarious. As I mentioned , I went speed-dating tonight at a Student Government-sponsored speed dating party. I sat in the same chair for about two hours, perhaps more, yet talked to I don't know how many guys about nothing in particular (except that I must've repeated my first name and major about twenty times). Of course, this was for kicks; and boy, did I ever get a bunch of laughs! I met... --a professional ballroom dancer who refuses to go to ballroom dance. (Our theory is that he's too used to concentrating on structure & technique.) --a half-Brit whose grandmother lives in the British Isles somewhere, whose parents met in New Zealand, and whose goal is to go to New Zealand for photography. --a guy who thought he was going to play pool, but got drafted into this; he started tossing around the fake rose petals. --several guys I sorta knew before. --and one weird guy who may actually have taken the whole "speed-dating" thing seriously.

As before, I will be celebrating three Christmases: one at each set of grandparents' and one at home. The first was yesterday. Of course, to start the day off, I was working more on wrapping gifts (for a later Christmas, fortunately; yesterday's had been finished on Wednesday). The fun part about this year is that I used paint to write the recipient's name on each package... when the little nozzle wasn't clogged up, which it happened to do once yesterday, fairly badly. I bent over it, squeezing hard... While unbeknownst to me, my mom had lit a small, itty-bitty candle and set it in the middle of the dining room table where I was working. My hair isn't really short.... And you can probably guess where this is leading. A few strands of my hair caught on fire, startling me and causing me to wave it around so it would go out quickly (which it did, leaving no noticeable damage to my haircut). Fortunately the package on which I was writing suffered no harm at all. :-)...

So I've been at home on break; it's quite nice. I'm getting pretty lazy though, or at least I'm not nearly as busy as I have been at college. I hope to remedy that soon. I have lots of projects up my sleeve.... books to read, journal entries to write, songs to copy into my songbook, meals to cook, Christmas shopping to do, relatives to visit, a Christmas letter to write, blogs to keep up on (*grin*), photographs to take, poems to memorize, and something in the bottom of my suitcase that I'm forgetting at the moment... dangit, I wish I could remember what that was! I remembered last night... and my sis would probably help me remember, but she's not around at the moment. Grr. I'm keeping up on my (relatively) new dancing hobby. I taught my brother the basic steps and two moves of Hustle today, believe it or not. He's one of the last people I would have thought interested enough to learn. But he wasn't bad at all, and admitted it was fun once yo...

I am incapable of sleeping in past eight o'clock, most of the time seven-thirty. Yes, that's A.M. Yes, even when I've been up till one o'clock the night before. Anyways.... Being Friday night, my dorm is emptying itself of its inhabitants, and tomorrow I will probably wake up to half-empty next-door rooms and a very slow, nearly dead, campus. All of which are conducive to midterm studying! So I will be reviewing notes from history and my journalism class, both of which have midterm exams early next week. Speaking of which... the other midterm exam isn't going to be all that hard, since it's simply identifying fifty rocks, minerals, and fossils. I went to review the items today, and found that I could probably remember them all if I just looked over my list a couple times. All I have to do is remember that schist is shiny and chert reminds me of the Beatles. (Don't ask me why; I think it has to do with the movie "The Yellow Submarine" and the...

...when you've just read nearly sixty pages of required reading and actually think you could have chosen to read the book for your own benefit. This autobiography for history, written by one Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, is quite interesting and somewhat adventureous. I don't like it as much as Chesterton's autobiography, of course, but it's sure more interesting than ever Ben Franklin's was. And more interesting than normal biographies that I've read. And it's a good thing. I have to finish at least the bio part (there are other documents in the book too) by Friday. In other news.... Huh. I can't seem to think of other news. Except that the yearbook photographer will be at dance tonight! And I'll get to gather interesting material for the captions, since I'm in charge of the dance page!!

Let's see... last night I went ballroom dancing again... that is SO much fun. And I'm going to be working on a research paper this afternoon... And it's cold here in the library. I must be sitting under an A/C vent or something. Well, I guess I'll tell y'all about ballroom dancing. A couple nights a week, a bunch of college kids get together to learn various ballroom dances from a guy going here who happens to look like Jesus. (It's funny!) Last night we learned salsa and swing dancing. I learned swing a looong time ago, but I forgot it all immediately, so I had to re-learn it. It was a lot easier than I remembered. The best part about dancing is when you get a guy who knows what he's doing and you can get on a roll with doing fancy moves like spins and such. :-) My little friend Bee sent me an e-mail today! And this isn't the first thing she's sent me - last week, I got a picture in the mail from her! That was soooo much fun. Now I'm go...